A Journalist Protects Her Sources

December 10, 1991

Daisy Sanchez, a television journalist in Puerto Rico, is scheduled to appear before a federal grand jury in Hartford today. She will presumably be asked to turn over videotapes and answer questions about her clandestine interviews with two defendants in the Wells Fargo robbery case who jumped bail last year.

Ms. Sanchez says she is ready to go to jail rather than turn over information she gathered under a guarantee of confidentiality. Fairness, and the First Amendment, are on her side.

Catching Filiberto Ojeda Rios and Luis Colon Osorio has been a top priority for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for more than a year. If Ms. Sanchez were a private citizen who had witnessed a crime, it would be proper to share her knowledge with the authorities. But she gathered the information about the fugitives as a journalist and there is no evidence that she broke laws in doing so.

She and the managers of the television station obviously believed that disseminating information about these men -- members of an extremist pro-independence movement in Puerto Rico called Los Macheteros -- would serve the public interest.

If prosecutors and grand juries succeed in forcing journalists to break their pledges of confidentiality to sources, the public is likely to be denied a valuable vehicle to help it arrive at the truth.

Ms. Sanchez, quite rightly, says she will refuse to surrender tapes that were not aired by the station and will not give information she has promised to keep confidential. Too many journalists have paid a heavy price by going to jail for refusing to break pledges to sources. We hope common sense prevails at this federal grand jury.

Pledges of confidentiality should never be given lightly. Once given, with the permission of editors, however, they should not be violated.

We hope the FBI succeeds in tracking down the fugitives. But a journalist is constitutionally protected to report and write without government harassment -- without being forced to act as an investigator for law enforcers. Ms. Sanchez should be allowed to return to her job without fear of punishment